Belgium’s Field Liberation Movement (FLM) has released a video opposing the latest Belgian field trial of GM poplar trees engineered for ready processing into biofuels. See here for more on the concept of biofuel-ready GMOs. The FLM is best known internationally for its 2011 action against an illegal field trial of GM potatoes, and the Belgian government’s subsequent, much-condemned attempt to prosecute these participatory citizens as a criminal organization. This was a typical example of the corporate gangsters calling the kettle black.

GM trees are easy to understand. Their purpose is the same as the purpose of corporate agriculture in general, albeit in a specially radical way, and they’re designed and deployed toward the same goals.

1. The goals of GM tree plantations are to drive deforestation, destroy ecosystems, and drive the people off the land. The goal is to destroy all human cultural diversity and wild biodiversity.

2. The goal is to destroy all diversity and impose social and environmental monoculture. The goal is to replace humanity and the Earth with a monocultural dead zone.

3. Corporations and governments do this for the sake of power. They and the scientism cult work to generate the monocultural dead zone for its own sake, on religious/ideological principle, and because monoculture, physically and culturally, always helps concentrate power and wealth.

4. For public consumption, this is for the sake of the propaganda idea of sustaining the extreme energy consumption mode of civilization and of doing so while finding solutions to climate change and environmental destruction.

Of course this always is only the idea of these, never the reality, always the contrary. Nothing can replace fossil fuels to enable the continuation of modernity’s extreme energy consumption, nor can such consumption be done in a way which doesn’t radically aggravate climate change and every other environmental crisis.

Biofuels are among the worst criminal frauds in both ways: Like other so-called “alternative” energy sources they depend completely on the foundation of fossil fuels; they’re less efficient than fossil fuels as energy sources; and they’re even worse greenhouse gas emitters and destroyers of carbon sinks. Meanwhile they function effectively to destroy agricultural land and food production by taking this land out of food production and consigning it to this purely worthless, destructive purpose. Biofuel-ready GM trees aggravate deforestation and climate chaos in the name of mitigating them. Other types of GM trees serve similar criminal purposes.

All GMOs are hoaxes and frauds in these same ways, in addition to their many other evils. GM tree plantations, which add a great escalation of the direct destruction of forests to the direct and indirect deforestation driven overwhelmingly by corporate industrial agriculture, comprise a new level of criminal destruction and evil being premeditated and carried out by those responsible, from the engineers to the media propagandists.

GM agriculture, and corporate industrial agriculture, offer nothing to humanity and the Earth but social and economic destruction, environmental destruction, famine, pandemics, war, and death. It’s clear that here is no way forward, only the deadest of dead ends.

The only way forward to survival, transcendence, and victory is the return home to the Earth. The broad highway home is the necessary global transformation to agroecology and Food Sovereignty. We must turn the clock forward.

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March 28, 2017

A corporation sells poison and therefore wants to maximize the presence of poison in our food and drinking water. The more poison it sells the greater the profit. The corporation insists that this is deadly poison for certain selected plants or insects but is harmless to people and animals who eat the food and drink the water which is loaded with the poison, and harmless to beneficial insects and to all other wildlife and the environment.

Jane says, “That makes no sense rationally, and all the evidence is against it. Plus you have a very strong motive to lie. I don’t believe you.”

Tom says, “Hallelujah, I believe! The critics are just anti-science fearmongers.”

According to the English language, which is the skeptic?

As in every other case where reality-based language comes into conflict with power, the English language isn’t used in public discourse wherever the corporate prerogative becomes controversial. At every such point an Orwellian impostor language substitutes, one which seeks to turn reality upside down. Thus according to themselves and in mainstream, “respectable” messaging, it’s the pro-poison fundamentalists who are called “skeptics”. That’s a feature of the pseudo-skeptic branch of the corporate media.

Most bizarrely, people are so indoctrinated that Jane too is likely to call Tom a “skeptic”. When even the potential raw material for a new political and cultural movement is brainwashed into preferring the dominant toxic culture’s own terminology, it’s clear that we who are trying to break ground for this movement have a tough row to hoe indeed.

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March 25, 2017

The hypocrites are at it again. Today the mainstream media is touting with great fanfare a new review claiming to have pinpointed the alleged “bad luck” incidence of cancer at 66%, relegating genetic determinism to a lowly 5% and allowing the rest to environmental factors.

These goofy pseudo-precise numbers are one half of what’s really a confused public relations presentation on the part of the science establishment and the corporate media. For them science is a mish-mash of emotive communications and the numerology of hyper-precise figures, which is what we have here. As usual, the mainstream media follows the lead of the scientists.

This is not actually a new study, but rather the kind of analysis of existing data which pro-corporate scientists disparage when it produces results they don’t like. In this case, it’s a review of a review. The original review in 2015 used statistical rigmarole to claim that most cancers are the purely random result of mutations during cell division and have no other cause. (The same scientists and fanboys who like this notion then turn around and deny that the very high incidence of mutations during any normal genetic engineering procedure is any kind of problem.) But to the discomfort of the researchers, this claim was widely disliked among the public at large. So they took the original back into the shop, made some cosmetic changes, and now have rolled it out with a new coat of paint.

The problem, as the researchers and their supporters are emphasizing today in the media, is that the first study allegedly was misunderstood. By this they mean they flubbed the propaganda presentation. So they needed a do-over. Here’s the opening words of a Science commentary published in tandem with the revamped paper:

It is a human trait to search for explanations for catastrophic events and rule out mere “chance” or “bad luck.” When it comes to human cancer, the issue of natural causes versus bad luck was raised by Tomasetti and Vogelstein about 2 years ago. Their study, which was widely misinterpreted as saying that most cancers are due neither to genetic inheritance nor environmental factors but simply bad luck, sparked controversy.

The fact is that throughout this entire presentation, starting with the 2015 original model and continuing today with the remake, the scientists have been unable to avoid talking in philosophical and political terms. This is inherent to the “bad luck” thesis as such, and to all cancer science which seeks to obfuscate cancer’s true environmental causation.

Contrary to the quote above, there was no “misinterpretation”, nor do media popularizers dumb down or sex up the allegedly complex, nuanced things the scientists are saying. The fact is no one propagates the cult of any group of “experts” more relentlessly than the experts themselves. The mainstream media just follows the experts’ lead. As it must, since the media receives all its propaganda themes from the experts themselves. The most inveterate and reckless popularizers are always the experts themselves.

This time they’ll try to do a better job of coaching the media: “While Tomasetti and Vogelstein’s first paper led to no less than a few hundred papers written in response, their new study appears to be more soothing to the nerves.” That’s what CNN sees in its crystal ball, which reflects back the researchers’ hopes for this time around.

The piece goes on to quote a scientist ally of the research:

“I was concerned about the last article, because it didn’t talk enough about prevention and it left people thinking, ‘Gee you’re just destined to get cancer and you can’t do anything about it,'” said Dr. Otis Brawley, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society. Brawley, who was not involved in the research said he was “much happier” with the current paper, even if it “doesn’t tell me anything I hadn’t known for the last 20 years.”

“Bert Vogelstein is an incredibly well-respected, well-known cancer biologist who published a paper very similar to this — you might even call it part one of this paper — two years ago,” said Brawley, explaining the original paper caused “quite a stir” because it implied that “almost all cancers were not preventable.”

“And it really upset the anti-smoking people, it upset the folks who are in the nutrition and physical activity for cancer prevention — he really upset the prevention crowd,” said Brawley, who believes the new paper is generally a better explanation of the original theory.

This sums up the problem with the original roll-out and is characteristic of the refurbished marketing. Now everyone’s on message in terms of adding politically correct disclaimers about how “lifestyle still matters”, even though they’re really claiming it doesn’t. Meanwhile in their disclaimers they’re focusing completely on mostly voluntary factors like smoking and sun exposure while eliding involuntary exposures like pesticides.

So the orchestration they’re attempting is to put over their formal “bad luck” statistical artifice (Brawley himself in the CNN piece calls it a “mathematical simulation”) while informally contradicting themselves by paying lip service in the media to some environmental factors while saying nothing about others. In this way they hope to do a better job of carrying out their mandate under the corporate science paradigm.

Establishment cancer research has long had the mandate to find that cancer is caused predominantly by non-environmental factors. This is necessary for the continuation of the corporate project, since if the people fully understood how corporate poisons were causing the modern cancer pandemic this might rouse them to overthrow corporate rule and even capitalism itself.

So the basic mission and problem is to suppress the theory and evidence of environmental causality. For a long time corporate normative scientists preferred genetic determinism as their go-to alleged primary cause of cancer. This is part of their general ideological commitment to biological determinism. (This in turn is an epigone of 19th century mechanism in physics; this biological version of the disproven physics was itself already disproven early in the 20th century but remains the mainstream scientific standard to this day.)

But the genetic theory has been so thoroughly debunked that even the mainstream is looking for an alternative. One candidate has been the “bad luck” theory, that cancer is caused by allegedly “random” mutation.

The first Tomasetti/Vogelstein paper itself was debunked scientifically. This subsequent study analyzing the original found that intrinsic factors can account for only as much as 10-30% of the incidence of cancer, while as much as 90% of cancers are caused by such extrinsic factors as industrial and agricultural poisons.

Little by little the environmental causation paradigm favored by the World Health Organization’s IARC and other bodies is gaining ground, as the evidence becomes more and more difficult for corporate establishment medicine and science to deny. But as we see in the media today, they’re doing their best to trump up whatever they can in the corporate defense. “Bad luck” is the theme du jour.

The trouble is that they also need to kowtow to both popular prejudice about how people “deserve” what they get, and they need to reckon with simple rationality whose default is that effects have causes. Science, of course, depends completely on the premise of causality. This has put the pro-corporate researchers in a predicament, and therefore they’re trying to say two different, inconsistent things at the same time: Cancer mostly is caused at random, and yet it also has tangible causes, and at any rate can have tangible solutions.

There are four ways that cells randomly mutate during cell division. One of them, called reactive oxygen species or “free radicals” could theoretically be reduced by exposing cells to special antioxidants. Vogelstein says a better understanding of these mutations could open up areas of research to develop these kinds of antioxidant preventative therapies.

This fraudulent depiction of oxidative stress as “random” is typical of corporate science. By contrast, the WHO’s IARC considers oxidative stress as one of the environmental factors causing cancer and applies this to its assessments of pesticides and other cancer agents. There we see one methodological divide between real science and fake corporate science, and an example of why the corporate scientific establishment despises the IARC.

(The bit about special therapies is standard by now: Existing low-tech, low-maintenance solutions which are known to work are simply ignored, while only high-maintenance, highly expensive, low-performing technological “silver bullets” are touted as possible “solutions”*.)

As for the numbers, we see the typical absurdity, the intellectual cul de sac of the corporate science establishment. 66%! Not 65, not 67, 66, get that number of angels dancing on the head of a pin right! All they did was play with numbers, but such research reifies numbers to the point that the researchers think they can arrive at a “real”, precise number, rather than a range like “probably 60-70%.” We see how establishment science indulges in the same mystification of fictive numbers as the entire system under Mammon, which reifies such fictions as GDP, GNP, stock prices, housing prices, corporate profit, money as such, as if those things are real. We see how today’s scientism cult is a branch of the Mammon religion.

(The 5% number for genetically determined cancer is probably in the ballpark, and the paper’s relative accuracy here may evince the researchers’ competitiveness vis fellow corporate normative teams who want to defend the genetic ideology. As for the pseudo-scientific precision of “66%”, it’s appropriate to the methodology of this study, which is nothing more than typical statistical manipulation helped along by fraudulently defined experimental and control groups.)

So far most skeptics are still mired in this same numerological paradigm. They understand that the corporate numbers are fake, but they still have faith that the “real” precision number does exist somewhere out there. Most haven’t yet reached the consciousness that the numerology presupposition is wrong in the first place. Science can identify only ranges of probability, not precise pinhead counts.

As for “bad luck”, like I corrected the quote above, this is not misunderstood by anyone. On the contrary, the only misunderstanding would be actually to believe in the alleged “randomness” of all these mutations, such that it would follow that the more cell divisions, the more cancer one would expect in a straight, two-variable manner. That’s the contention of this line of argument.

But the fact is they have done nothing to delineate true experimental and control groups, and they have literally zero idea how much environmental influence there is on these allegedly “random” mutations. They themselves admit that in cases such as smoking the influence can be quantified. But this is only a most glaring example, and one where they’ve largely surrendered the political fight on behalf of the corporate honor, especially since capitalism has largely been successful in pegging lung cancer from smoking as an individual recklessness rather than the result of systematic corporate marketing and government subsidies.

Reason teaches us that the same causality exists for all the influences, especially industrial and agricultural poisons like pesticides, the defense and justification of which currently is a core campaign of the scientific establishment.

This kind of research has done nothing to delineate true experimental and control groups. To do that an experiment would have to remove all groups from the environment as such. Indeed, when pressed pro-poison activists often throw up their hands and admit it’s impossible to perform an experiment without all the groups being subject to the corrupted environment, and therefore it’s impossible to perform truly rigorous science. It’s the same as when they claim, as they regularly do, that it’s impossible to recruit technically competent personnel for regulatory panels and such who don’t also work for industry. In both cases their contention is that we the people should therefore give up, surrender all hope of legitimate study or oversight, and submit to the most authoritarian extremes of simply believing and doing what we’re told.

It’s true that we the people must relinquish false belief in the corporate regulatory and science establishment. But the answer isn’t to surrender to their false authority. Quite the contrary. We must demolish and abolish completely the authority of those who help to force cancer upon us, as part of abolishing the cancer poisons themselves.

*Consider these axioms of today’s scientific establishment, the “normal science” it consistently sets out to “prove”:

“Profitable products cannot be toxic or harmful to human health. Only things available freely from nature and labor are toxic.”

Are any of these rationally plausible? They are not. Quite the contrary, as we know from how evolution works. But as is made abundantly clear on a daily basis, today’s scientists, engineers, their media flacks, and their fanboys all are evolution deniers.

We are convinced that strong and truly independent European institutions like the EFSA (the food safety authority), EMA (the medicines agency) and ECHA (the chemicals agency) are crucial for defending public health and building public trust in the EU.

We abolitionists are committed to demolishing all public trust in Monsanto and its allied globalist agencies. We see here how so-called electoral “alternatives” are offering no alternative whatsoever. The problem is religious belief in corporate normative regulators as such. The problem is fundamentalist belief in “regulating” corporate cancer poisons rather than abolishing them. These people are not part of the solution. They are part of the problem.

Never has it been more true of anyone than of today’s civic flat-earthers that they learn nothing and forget nothing: They still want “public trust in the EU”, public trust in the EFSA, and in the EPA, in corporate electoralism and the technocratic regulatory state as such.

It’s congenital with them. Humanity must find the wellsprings of its resurgence elsewhere.

They reverted to their previous position, dictated to them by Monsanto since the 1970s, that such testing would be too expensive. What this really means, of course, is too politically expensive. It wouldn’t do for the people to know from systematic government testing (as opposed to the ad hoc, self-selected testing of NGO programs) how rife their food is with this deadly cancer agent. (Last autumn the FDA also suspended its own alleged plan to test for glyphosate.)

Of course the notion of expense is self-evidently absurd. If capitalism worked the way the good civics primers claim then Monsanto would have to pay the cost of all such testing, performed by truly independent laboratories. If the expense of this would render the product unprofitable, then the product shouldn’t exist, ipso facto. That’s in addition to the truly scientific safety tests which would be required, and the hard ban which would be imposed as soon as the product is found to cause cancer.

But now I’m the one telling jokes. Of course everything the primers and mainstream media say about capitalism is a lie, capitalism does not work, and nothing rational or sane can exist wherever these would conflict with the corporate imperative. The regulators are full partners in this great campaign of organized crime and poisonism.

Last week we contemplated the revelations coming out the Monsanto cancer litigation. Monsanto has been forced by the court to divulge much hitherto secret information about its propaganda machine and how it has sought to cover up the facts about glyphosate’s cancerousness. The new information especially reinforces our longstanding knowledge of the real character of regulators like the EPA. Such regulatory agencies are indelibly pro-corporate and can never serve the people the way the good civics textbooks claim. They were designed to do the opposite, to assist corporate organized crime in looting and poisoning the people and destroying the environment.

Among the new proofs of what we already knew are the Monsanto e-mails crowing about their practice of getting academic scientists to put their names on papers written by Monsanto PR flacks. They call it “ghost writing”. Monsanto cadres discussed several specific examples including a pathologist at New York Medical College. Embarrassed that one of its prostitutes has been caught in the act, NYMC is scrambling to cover its tracks and promises to investigate the good doctor. Of course the kind of organization which doesn’t let it be known implicitly that such corruption is acceptable wouldn’t be the one caught sheltering it.

This is just de jure corruption, the more superficial kind. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Therefore, in a broader, deeper sense Monsanto and its fellow oligopoly corporations “ghost write” the entire establishment agenda for toxicological and cancer research, and the paradigm of “science” deployed by regulators. Even mavericks like Seralini tend to define themselves as reformers within this corporate normative framework.

But history proves that nothing short of scientific and social revolution can overthrow such entrenched, sclerotic, malign frameworks.

For a compendium of the fraudulent “science” of glyphosate deployed in publications written by industry and used as religious gospel by regulators, see the new report “Buying Science”.

Every valley shall be techno-salted. Every field shall be a simultaneous bio-warfare lab and deployment.

Britain’s Sainsbury Laboratory, a typical publicly funded corporate research division, continues its program to develop inferior, dangerous, highly expensive “hi-tech” GM potatoes as a substitute for already existing non-GM potatoes which are much less expensive and superior in every way. Why would anyone want to do something so pointless and stupid? As with every other GMO and the GM endeavor as such, the only reasons are religious cultism and corporate power.

Sainsbury has applied to British regulators for permission for an open-air field trial. Field trial applications always are flimsy where it comes to substantive information, since both corporate applicant and pro-corporate regulator are in the business of making the project go forward with only the minimum politically necessary fake “regulation” to hinder it along the way.

For example, a field trial application usually includes rudimentary information on the genetic composition of the original laboratory-cultured GM crop. This information is at best irrelevant to real-world conditions, and usually fraudulent even on its own terms. But this charade allows the corporate applicant and the regulator to claim to the public that the GMO has been tested and assessed for safety.

Vegetatively propagated direct-food GMOs like potatoes are the most dangerous because 1. They’re direct food or just minimally processed, which means genetically modified and other mutated genetic fragments will be least broken down during processing; 2. Since they’re clones they carry along unexpurgated all the mutations of the entire genetic engineering process. (As opposed to crops like maize where the original genetically engineered plants then may have been back-crossed with another variety, and therefore may have had some of the mutations bred out of them. Not so for cloned potatoes.) Plus, industrial potatoes are among the most pesticide-laden crops.

That’s one of the reasons why an accurate genetic analysis would be even more critically necessary for GM potatoes than for most other GMOs. In fact we know that all GMO genomes are riddled with mutations from the engineering process. Even the few independent analyses have only begun to catalog the extent of the genetic chaos. What they’ve proven clearly is that GMOs comprise an extremely hazardous flouting of evolutionary safeguards and that by forcing GMOs into the food supply, governments and corporations are performing a massive, nonconsensual feeding experiment upon all of us. The US government and the GM corporations believe that GMOs are poisonous and will harm human health. If they didn’t believe this they would have performed legitimate safety tests from the outset. They always have refused to do this, and always have lied about it. This proves that they believe the product is highly dangerous. Since they felt it was politically impossible to perform real food safety science, they’ve instead embarked upon this massive human feeding experiment to find out the extent of the harm. They figure by the time the results are in, corporate control of food and agriculture will be total, and it will be too late for humanity to do anything about its biological poisoning and servitude. The experiment’s results then will help technocracy design a more truly scientific genetic engineering program toward eugenic goals. That’s the way in which agricultural GMOs are a stalking horse for eventual GE-based human eugenics.

Sainsbury’s application for an as yet nonexistent product, and its invitation to the regulator to assure the public of the safety of this thing which doesn’t yet exist, is the best commentary on the fact that everything the corporate system tells us about GMOs, in addition to being always a lie, is always a pure fabrication. The corporations and governments tout nothing but the idea of “GMOs” as such, while in reality the actual GM crops always have comprised a poorly-designed, shoddy, backward, failure-prone product.

This is also the best commentary on the fact that field trials have no scientific basis or purpose, but rather are propaganda exercises. They propagate the fraud that GMOs are tested for environmental safety and agronomic performance when the tests are designed to give no meaningful information on either of these, just as corporate feeding trials test nothing but industrial parameters irrelevant to food safety.

Therefore field trials are designed to serve as propaganda vehicles. They’re meant to normalize the GMO ideology as such and to impress upon the people the sense of the alleged ubiquity and necessity of GMOs and the alleged inevitability of GMO domination.

Typically a high-profile field trial combines the “positive” side of the propaganda – how great the product is, why it’s necessary, how it’s going to save the world – with the negative side meant to reinforce the sense that GMOs are omnipresent, unstoppable, and that there’s no alternative but to surrender to them. As with all such propaganda, this has the dual purpose of reinforcing cult worship as well as the intimidation of opponents.

We see how GM field trials serve as a stage of the GMO propaganda process just as they comprise a stage of the GM crop development process. This parallel is poetically appropriate since GMOs as such serve only fictive purposes, including an overall propaganda function. Their ultimate purposes – profit, power, control – have nothing to do with natural reality, but only with the totalitarian will to obliterate existing reality and replace it with a malign, ideologically determined reality. And thus it’s also appropriate, and was always inevitable, that all of the real-world effects of GMOs – environmental, health, agronomic, economic – are purely destructive.

As with every GMO case, to say again, there already exist much better, safer, less expensive non-GM potato varieties for all the traits touted for the high-maintenance product. We call this the Law of the Inferiority of GMOs, and it is a law because there are no exceptions to it. GMOs invariably are worse performing, more dangerous, and far more expensive than already existing non-GM varieties. (The link is to my piece on Simplot’s GM potatoes; the same criticisms and disproofs apply even more firmly in this case.) As always, GMOs have zero purpose but to reinforce corporate industrial prerogatives and to serve as propaganda for the cult of technocracy as such.

In the final analysis that’s all that GMOs are about: Whether one is to be an anti-science, flat-earth cultist of technocracy, or whether one chooses to embrace reality. Technocracy is already a proven failure according to all its claims, and the inevitable final, complete collapse of hi-tech industrial agriculture shall be its final and worst failure. The GM cult is designed to induce and force humanity to remain shackled to this sinking ship until we’re all engulfed by famine. That’s what the GMO regime is designed to do, nothing more or less.

We know the true and only way forward, the way of health, vibrancy, and abundance: Agroecology, a fully demonstrated science and set of practices ready for full global deployment, needing nothing but the fully renewable resources we already have, thus needing only the commitment and will to do it.

Help propagate the new and necessary ideas.

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Climate chaos is the ultimate corporate campaign, and the fraudulent politics of it have comprised the ultimate exercise in corporate manipulation and co-optation. The fact that all pre-existing liberal and “left” forces have willingly allowed themselves to be organized according to corporate imperatives is the best proof that these pre-existing forces exist only within the framework of normative corporate rule.

For the record, there is one and only one solution for averting the worst of climate change and for adapting to the level of crisis already locked in: 1. Greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. 2. Stop destroying carbon and nitrogen sinks. 3. Rebuild sinks on a mass scale.

This will require a revolution of civilization. Most important, pressing, and direct, it requires that with all possible speed humanity must abolish industrial agriculture (the worst emitter and by far the worst destroyer of sinks) and undertake the global deployment of agroecology (the great rebuilder of sinks and the only way to produce sufficient and abundant food without extreme energy consumption; therefore the only way possible if humanity wants to continue to eat).

But denial of these basic facts is endemic to the commitment of all pre-existing political forces in the West to the model of civilization based on extreme energy consumption, high-maintenance technology, and the twin derangements of productionism and consumerism, each completely unanchored from any use value, any happiness value, any human value at all.

(The only exception to this has been action purely to block or delay corporate projects such as the Keystone or Dakota Access Pipelines. Holding up enemy assaults is worthwhile. (Even today it could be possible to field a political party dedicated in practice only to monkeywrenching and gridlocking, if anyone cared to do that. But today’s electoralists seem congenitally incapable of viewing things this necessary way.) But almost no one who does this does it on behalf of an abolitionist philosophy, or even from a purely obstructionist point of view. Instead they couple it with reactionary “reformist” notions which are part of the same cancer driving the corporate assaults they want to block. I even saw examples of nimbyism among the Dakota protectors, with some of the “leaders” among them saying they didn’t mind if the pipeline went somewhere else, just not through their space. But the only good value left is to be against all pipelines as such, everywhere. Meanwhile anyone who doesn’t consider all the Earth and all its people sacred will also sell out his own land and people. That you can count on like night follows day.)

It has been pointless for Peak Oilers rationally to teach people about the finitude of fossil fuels and the fact that nothing can or will replace them; the commitment to the technocratic civilization is religious, not rational. Therefore this commitment cannot be touched by rational argument. Religious fundamentalists can be converted by spiritual force, or their commitment can be crushed by main force. As the Oil Age ends, most of the technocrats will cling to their theology ever more grimly until the Earth itself purges them.

But until then they will continue to believe: They will believe that fossil fuels are infinite, or that Jesus or Cthulhu or the Flying Spaghetti Monster will descend one day with a new energy source to replace them. Therefore, they will continue to believe that the climate crisis can be confronted within the same framework which is driving it. They’ll believe you can have infinite emissions and total destruction of sinks and still “solve” climate chaos. This flat-earthism goes hand in hand with the flat earth cult of infinite energy itself. We are dealing with a fundamentalist religion.

Thus modern technocratic politics has attained consensus on the systematic ravaging of ecosystems, culminating in the rising climate chaos driven by the patterns of energy consumption, waste, and ecological destruction practiced and imposed by Western industrialized productionism and consumerism. The climate crisis is caused by these actions. Since corporate state elites and their supporters have long known this and in spite of lots of lip service have refused to do anything to avert the worst of it, it’s long been true that climate change is an intentional campaign of aggression against the Earth and all vulnerable peoples. Thus climate change takes its place as the most extreme and far-reaching of the corporate campaigns designed to cause disaster, destruction, and chaos. The corporations then proceed to use the crises they intentionally generate as further opportunities for aggression and profit. All corporate sectors practice this. Corporate agriculture is the most aggressive and destructive practitioner of all.

Corporate industrial agriculture has been by far the worst destroyer of local and global environments. Most of all, corporate industrial agriculture is the worst driver of the climate crisis which in recent years has been wreaking havoc on African farming and food harvests. Today, after years of widespread drought and collapsed harvests, large parts of sub-Saharan Africa are on the verge of famine. This famine, like all previous modern famines, is completely artificial, completely man-made, caused by corporate agriculture and now by the climate change driven by this agricultural sector. The corporate system promises to impose this same dynamic upon the entire Earth and upon all people.

One way the system’s propaganda sets up the people for this is through standard lies about such crises as drought. “Drought” almost always is an artificial problem. Drought happens when a society deploys modes of cultivation and grows crop varieties which aren’t well-suited to the rainfall conditions of the region. Historically, drought was seldom a problem for traditional agriculture, and today it’s seldom a problem for agroecology, for these are designed to be diverse and resilient in the event of dry seasons. It’s only industrial commodity monoculture which is designed to be highly vulnerable to drought.

What’s more, today’s increasingly volatile rainfall patterns and periods of low rainfall are features of the climate chaos being driven most of all by that same industrial agriculture. This sector is the worst greenhouse gas emitter and by far the worst destroyer of GHG sinks.

In both these ways “drought” is a man-made, intentional crisis. And in every case, in classic exploitation manner the drought which is driven intentionally by corporate agriculture then is used as a propaganda pretext on behalf of escalating that same corporate onslaught. This in turn only escalates the crisis.

We can draw an analogy from this inadequate, counterproductive agricultural mode to the inadequate, counterproductive political mode which enables it. In the same way that corporate industrial agriculture is designed to maximize both drought and vulnerability to drought, so corporate technocratic civilization is designed to maximize both environmental catastrophe and vulnerability to these catastrophes. All the politics of this civilization, including so-called “radicalism” within the technocratic framework, are designed to help maximize the catastrophe and the vulnerability. All the politics of this civilization have been pre-packaged toward this purpose.

Persistence Proves Intent. If governments, corporations, universities, the mainstream media, the professional classes, and the voters see that surging climate chaos and ecological catastrophe are the inevitable direct effects of their production and consumption actions and yet they continue with these actions, this proves that the cataclysm is part of the intended effect. The major effects of a large-scale action always comprise an organic whole. It’s never true that a necessary system policy has ambivalent results. On the contrary, the major effects are always the desired effects, because if the system desired different effects, there’s always an alternative which could preserve the “good” effects without the allegedly “bad”. There’s really no such thing as “collateral damage”. That’s just a propaganda distinction to reinforce the lie that some effects weren’t sought by the system and are deplored by it. But if there really were major effects which the system did not anticipate and found bad, it would change the policy so as no longer to produce those effects in a major way. Persistence proves either that the effect, if truly unanticipated, is nevertheless welcome, or else that it was anticipated and consciously intended all along. Morally and practically it makes no difference. The major effects of an action comprise an organic whole, so anyone who wants one characteristic effect of an action will anticipate and want its other effects and will welcome any major effect he didn’t anticipate.

Therefore, the proof that all these outcomes are intended by the Western corporate system and its supporters is that they persist in the patterns of action which are historically proven to produce these outcomes. This is called Strict Proof of Strict Intent. It’s the moral baseline which sums up the modern age. What distinguishes modern crimes against humanity and the Earth from all previous crimes, besides their sheer magnitude, is that with modern science, modern information systems, and modern communications, it’s no longer possible to be innocently unaware of these crimes. Today all ignorance is willful ignorance and therefore culpable. So philosophically we can dispense with the concept of “ignorance”. Climate change, other crimes against ecological and public health, the economic and political destructiveness of globalization, these all are no longer in question, nor is there any question about guilt. The one and only question left is the question of power, and the question of which judgement shall prevail: That of the targets who only now are beginning to fight back, or that of the criminals. Today everywhere only the judgement of the criminals prevails. Tomorrow it shall be different.

Humanity shall evolve to meet this great crisis and challenge. This evolution must include a political and cultural evolution beyond the maladaptive technocratic consciousness to the necessary ecological and abolitionist consciousness. The first stage of this evolution is to spread the necessary ideas for it. First people hear of the ideas, then they become aware of them even if they reject them at first, then the historical situation changes, the people are forced to relinquish the old consciousness and become ardent to embrace the new. And then they embrace the necessary new ideas and build the new framework from there. This is the only way humanity shall meet the climate crisis, however long or short it takes. While we pollinators cannot force the ripe moment into being faster than history brings it, we can sow the ideas as fast and thoroughly as possible so that the people render them kinetic at the earliest possible moment.

1. Fossil fuels are finite, and this one-off ahistorical extreme level of energy consumption is now reaching its end, never to be repeated. Humanity soon shall resume historical levels of energy consumption. Therefore the extremely expensive, luxurious, high-maintenance civilization dependent upon this extreme energy consumption will collapse. In particular, industrial agriculture will collapse, thereby dooming to famine any civilization which has not transformed to agroecology.

Therefore the rational, sane course of action is to commit to building movements toward the necessary new cultural, agronomic, socioeconomic, and political forms. The rational, sane course is to build Food Sovereignty and agroecology.

Conversely, any mode of action or support for the status quo is irrational and insane. Any such action or support, however superficially “moderate”, implicitly seeks the most extreme insanity since in its death throes the corporate system will resort to literally any measure it can, no matter how extreme in its violence, to maintain its power and existence. Prior to these death throes the system’s attempts to prop itself up will manifest in ever greater political and economic volatility, which comprise a direct cultural mirror of the ever greater physical volatility generated by climate chaos and poisonism.

In all these ways the masses feel the ground shake beneath their feet.

And they feel how the corporate system is destroying their economic existence.

And they sense how the system itself is tottering.

All this musters tremendous free-floating fear. Left to itself this fear-itself makes most people inherently timid, conservative, desperate to believe in the very status quo which afflicts them. Most are desperate to believe the very thing which is most insane and self-destructive for them to believe, that they don’t feel the ground shake beneath their feet. This desperate will to self-delusion drives the masses to their own volatility and implicit extremism corresponding with that of the elites and the physical environment.

This was the situation for the 2016 US plebiscite on the corporate globalization system. One’s choices were to vote Yes to the status quo in all its chaotic extremism, or No.

Let’s look at the major subdivisions among the Yes vote.

*The Clinton vote was the most conservative vote. Superficially this was the most acquiescent status quo Yes vote. This was the most obvious way to say “I like the status quo and want nothing to change.” This most pure status quo vote seemed the safest, most conservative way to vote Yes and refuse to acknowledge the ground shaking. Thus the voters refuse to face reality, they flee into fantasy, and they vote for the system’s volatility, which led to Trump.

*Most absurd were the Sanders and Stein fantasies. Ironically this mode of voting Yes indicates the most active, conscious affirmation of the status quo, since it takes the form of constructive criticism. One votes this way to say, “I like the status quo but have thought about it and want some changes.” These voters are more likely to pay lip service to reality, but are still unwilling or unable truly to face reality, reject the status quo, and commit to what’s necessary. Thus they too ultimately refuse to confront the crises, they flee to fantasy, and they vote for the status quo volatility which created Trump.

*Then we have the de jure Trump vote. Some of the wealthy and some die-hard cultists may fail to feel the ground shake and voted only for a change of parties. Some feel the ground shake and may vaguely want some kind of change but are uncommitted enough that the corporate system still could manipulate them into voting Yes to it. Most are like the others and refuse to face reality, and these voted most directly for the most volatile manifestation of the system-driven chaos. Regardless, the de jure Trump vote was the same vote as the others, the refusal to deal with reality and the will to prop up the fantasy, and the binge, to the bitter end.

All three of these Yes modes are modes of the refusal to liberate oneself, refusal to acknowledge and confront reality, refusal to commit to the necessary ideas and actions, and the desperate clinging to the electoral religious fantasy. Thus they all voted for whatever result the plebiscite coughed up. They voted unanimously for it.

It wasn’t inevitable that the wheel would land on Trump and not Clinton. The vote was close enough, a few breaks this way or that and it could’ve landed on her. But all the voters voted Yes. This was the only vote possible.

And then there’s the No vote. There may be some non-voters who are so vegetative that they don’t feel the ground shake and don’t care. Most of the No voters recognize that there’s no point to the rituals of the system and have given up on these. But they haven’t committed to the necessary movement action.

Then there’s the small group of affirmatively conscious anti-voters like myself. Most of these also haven’t committed.

Objectively the people are aware that it all matters, it all counts, abstention is not an option. The Yes voters are those who react by doubling down, digging the hole faster, “committing” by denying reality. The No voters are those who have stopped digging, even if most don’t yet exert themselves to climb out of the pit. But in principle it’s they who may be able to climb, whereas those who can only look downward and dig faster are unable even to think of climbing.

They’re the ones who dug up Trump. All of them. And what will they dig up next, if we don’t climb up out of the pit and fill it in behind us?

Today we live in fear of cancer, one of the great and insidious fears deeply delving, haunting the civilized psyche. We know that the power structures ranging uncannily above us like storm clouds, pelting us unpredictably with rain and winds, are insinuating this cancer through the industrial poisons they pump into our air, water, and food. We know this adds up to an existential incarceration and we fear we’re on death row. People don’t know what to do, which is why denial is the most common response. To those who struggle to overcome denial, the corporate state directs its propaganda campaigns.

The most directly potent cancer agents are the agricultural poisons. Humanity has no choice but to come together as a movement dedicated to abolishing these poisons. Nothing less can liberate us from the fear and the reality of cancer. So far this movement does not yet exist, only the necessary idea for it.

Once in awhile one of these poisons becomes the subject of a political flash point. Today glyphosate, one of the most cancerous agricultural poisons, is under fire. Even some governments and other system forces have been cutting ties with it. Where this happens we abolitionists must urge all effective anti-poison actions and use the situation for the greatest benefit to the necessary ideas and to organizing for these ideas. But we must never regress to faith in discredited enemy organizations. Thus where we have evidence of discord at the EPA we use it to demonstrate that the evidence against the poisons is so extreme that even within the ranks of the enemy some are losing faith. But we must never give aid and comfort to reactionary notions about wanting to “reform” the regulator, or any version of wanting to resurrect faith in it. This is the main preoccupation of gatekeeper consumerist groups who really seek a deal with the corporations.

The EPA has been forced into damage mode by the rising tsunami against glyphosate. From the mainstream point of view, the milestone was the 2015 finding of the World Health Organization’s cancer research agency (IARC) that glyphosate causes cancer. According to secret Monsanto memos forced into the public light by ongoing litigation, the EPA tipped off Monsanto about the IARC’s upcoming finding and helped Monsanto prepare an attack. This included EPA officials working to prevent an investigation of glyphosate’s cancerousness by the Department of Health and Human Services, and academics agreeing to have their names placed on “scientific” papers actually written by Monsanto public relations cadres.

In April 2016 the EPA publicly released a document declaring glyphosate to be “unlikely to be carcinogenic to humans”, then withdrew it from public view. The memo publicly existed just long enough for Monsanto to tout it as an EPA formal public opinion. The EPA implicitly endorses this Monsanto characterization even as it claims the memo was posted inadvertently. This clearly is a lie.

What’s really happening is that the evidence of glyphosate’s cancerousness is so overwhelming that the EPA is scared to defend this position in full public view. Seeing how badly the EU’s EFSA has been floundering in public since its own formal declaration in 2015, the EPA has been unable to assemble a propaganda package it feels comfortable defending. That’s why it’s been stonewalling and resorting to such tricks as now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t with public releases. This has been nothing but an innuendo campaign meant to prop up the pro-glyphosate status quo without actually having to make a formal public declaration. The EPA knows it can never plausibly defend any such declaration, since it’s in the nature of the brazen pro-glyphosate lie that it can have no plausible content or evidence to justify it.

We’ve been getting more details about the EPA’s internal angst. According to a secret EPA memo leaked to a French magazine, there’s an internal dispute about the agency’s campaign to whitewash glyphosate. The EPA’s Office of Research and Development (ORD) accuses the Office of Pesticide Programs (OPP, the division which released and then suppressed the April 2016 memo) of using a reductive, anti-scientific measure instead of the internationally agreed scientific measure. All agencies including the EPA agree in principle to use a scale of five levels in assessing the cancerousness of a chemical, ranging from “carcinogenic” to “unlikely to be carcinogenic”. (The WHO’s cancer agency found glyphosate to be a “probable carcinogen”, the second most severe ranking.) According to the ORD’s memo, in practice the OPP drops this and applies a reductive Yes/No measure rigged always to give a No answer.

The OPP refuses to divulge the methodology it uses. This is because it really uses no method at all. It only starts with the dogma that it will whitewash the chemical, then engages in whatever convolution is necessary to reach this conclusion. Evidently these methodological convolutions are so contorted as to be laughable, which is why the EPA is refusing to release and stand by a public proclamation.

Nevertheless the EPA’s intent and result is the same: Whitewash glyphosate. Prop it up as long as possible. EPA performs this role most directly on behalf of Monsanto, the politically powerful corporation most precariously dependent upon glyphosate.